“Don’t fence me in.” It’s amazing how well-known that line from the old Roy Rogers song still is, even though it dates back to 1934*. I guess there’s something deep-rooted about the song’s celebration of the wide-open expansiveness of life on the range.
That tune often pops into my head when I think about the current state of the consumption-based IT market and some of the new offerings we’re seeing out there. To me, all of them seem distinctly limited either in the range of infrastructure they cover, or what you can achieve with them, or both. It’s a stark contrast with HPE GreenLake’s broad portfolio of on-premises, as-a-Service IT solutions.
A broad choice of capabilities is not just a nice-to-have for your move to pay-as-you-go IT – it’s essential. Without it, you risk getting boxed into a piecemeal approach or building out a project that gets you only part of the way to where you want to go.
With that in mind, here are three questions you should ask your vendor to make sure that their vision is big enough to encompass your goals:
Is your solution broad enough to cover my project?
Solutions designed for a single zone of the data center are of limited value. For example, storage seems to be a popular entry point for new vendors in the consumption-based market. But it’s hard to see how much value these products can offer without a similar level of consumption capabilities in compute and networking. If you were shopping for a new laptop and it had all the great storage features you were looking for, but a mediocre CPU, would you buy it?
It’s not a perfect analogy, of course. HPE GreenLake is not a component of IT – it’s a whole different kind of IT (see Don Randall’s blog Defining the Next Chapter for the IT Industry: On-Premises IT as a Service). But the principle still holds. No CIO ever went into a project thinking “We must make sure the storage part is pay-as-you-go.” The aim is always to get the right gear across the board to get a particular job done in the most effective way. And if the most effective way is via consumable IT, then that’s what you need.
With HPE GreenLake, you can access a vast range of HPE infrastructure for whatever your use case requires. From intelligent storage, to campus and datacenter networking, to workload-optimized compute, we’ve got you covered.
What metrics do you use to track usage?
Your consumption data can and should provide valuable insights. Some vendors use metering metrics that are too coarse-grained to be of much use – kilowatts per hour, for example (see Paul Zinn’s post How HPE Metering Technology Delivers a Better Way to Consume IT.) These really limit what you can do with your data. As Paul points out, “Looking at power consumption doesn’t tell you whether a server is using most of its CPU or memory, or whether a storage array is filling up.” That restricts your ability to do capacity planning and management.
HPE GreenLake, in contrast, leverages metering that’s appropriate to your use case, and provides easy visibility into your data through the HPE Consumption Analytics Portal.
Can you handle the workloads I have in mind?
Not all workloads are created equal. If you’re interested in taking your database platform, for example, into as-a-Service mode, that’s a very different objective than, say, doing more virtualization. The fact that a vendor offers a solution for a particular workload is no guarantee that they can cover others.
With any consumable IT initiative, you need to know that your vendor brings to the table not only the right technologies, but also the right expertise. That’s especially true of heavy-duty workloads that are both highly complex and highly business-critical, such as SAP HANA.
The HPE GreenLake portfolio includes a range of preconfigured workload solutions (you can find the complete portfolio here.) For each one, we leverage a solution architecture validated by our software partners and backed by HPE’s global experience and deep expertise. We’ve done this before, many times, and we know how to make it work for your business.
Having a range of choice is always a good thing, and that, of course, includes a choice of vendors. But the vendor you select shouldn’t limit your opportunities. With HPE GreenLake, you’re all set for a great ride through the wide-open country of on-prem, as-a-service IT.
Read more about how HPE GreenLake helps you gain cloud-like flexibility with on-premises control.
Czarena Siebert
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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Czarena is an experienced IT professional with 14 years of experience at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. During this time, Czarena has held senior roles, including business development management in the Americas, worldwide marketing for Mission-Critical Services, worldwide business development management for Multivendor Services, and most recently, worldwide program manager for Consumption IT Solutions. Czarena believes strongly that a customer-focused approach at all levels drives success for both our customers and for HPE.
